The original video (now repuloaded by another youtuber)
Mend It Mark The £25,000 Pre Amp that went Wrong Tom Evans Mastergroove SR mkIII RJbpFSFziI
the backlash mk1:
Tom Evans audio proves that their $30,000 audio preamp is garbage by filing a bogus copyright claim
The backlash mk2:
Tom Evans Audio doubles down on a bad decision
I think it’s important that this kind of stuff gets shared far and wide. Behaviour like this from manufacturers shouldn’t be tolerated or encouraged.
Another time I’ll tell you the full sorry story of the shoddy treatment Tom Evans tried to subject a good friend (RIP) to with a set of faulty power amps after he had actually done Tom a favour.
In the end I drove with my mate to Tom’s place to confront him, and lets just say forcefully made threats of violence were required to motivate Tom to sort out and make good his endless broken promises.
Saw inside his workshop too, and it immediately made sense to me. It was a chaotic bodgers paradise and absolutely reeked of weed.
That £25k phono amp looks fairly typical of Tom’s craft and engineering output…
[Note, just my opinion only based on personal experience, nothing to do with AA - mods delete if this is considered too hot to host]
I mean one look inside that box, suggests that they are well aware they’re taking the piss. An aggressive stance on trying to remove the evidence from public sight, will now only draw more attention to it.
Feels like he’s about to get everything he deserves with this one!
If Rossman is prepared to take Tom Evans on, then they’ve pretty much already lost. He’s already taken on Apple and won, and has been massively influential in getting right to repair legislation enabled, so a micro sized manufacturer with a dubious claim will be a piece of piss for him.
I watched the video when it came out and was shocked, but not surprised at how the amp was put together.
Given TE doubling down on douchebagery, I kinda hope they do try to take Louis on… it won’t go well for them. He’s a youtuber with a 2.2 million following, the reach of his audience is immense. The TE name will become household, for the wrong reasons.
I don’t know if Tom Evans is aware of the Streisand effect… but I suspect he’s about to be.
Yet another shed-based hifi maker who thinks it’s still the 1980s? Whodathunkit?
There’s a long, rambling thread on Fink Pish (well, there were 3 or 4 but Tony merged them), which covers all of the inevitable points, plus all of the inevitable hurrrdurrr-derping from the usual drooling knuckle-draggers…
cough arkless cough
sorry… had a tickle in my throat there
And it is boring there as well.
Good old Jez Klueless - he’s one of a handful of Pishers so stupid, time-wasting and annoying that I keep them on permanent ‘ignore’. Life is too short to be playing chess with pigeons…
If TE doeasn’t pull his head out of his arse he’s going to find himself mired in a very expensive litigation which it’s unlikely he can win.
Designs such as he uses are not patentable - they are themselves derivative, nobody has made physical copies of anything (~ making a map isn’t a claim to ownership of the land portrayed), nor encouraged others to do so, nobody else has asserted ownership of the designs, and no libels have been uttered. He has no case.
He HAS been shown to be someone that it would be wise to avoid doing business with, someone with low build standards, someone who deliberately makes his equipment unserviceable thus denying fair use, and who fails to properly support customers.
Were I engaged in legal action with him I would be most interested in pursuing things like his CE compliance documentation for his products, and likewise a close look at his dealings with HMRC would likely be instructive…
He’s opening several worm cans all at once…
Shame it’s gone downhill fast. Guess Tom is pretty renowned as hit and miss re warranty and service, I know a couple of guys who’ve been well looked after. Maybe amenability is based on the standard of the days toke (by the sounds of others experience and pure speculation!) In any case whatever the reason it’s come back to haunt him.
On the positive, his stuff does sound good. If you take a look at a Mastergroove from a few years back you’ll see all metal supports and a fairly tidy looking build in a Heath Robinson sort of way. The newer hacked out copper shielding and plastic support may look agricultural but he has looked to minimise metal internally in the way he’s always favoured plastic for the casework in recent units. Looks shit / sounds better, I know what I’d take. The real cost is in parts selection, many hours individually testing op amps and the like to find the 1 in hundreds that meet the required matching tolerances. There’s a significant labour cost to add to any component cost and spread over very few units. Whether that justifies the prices charged, I don’t know and haven’t heard one.
Looking elsewhere, take a D’agostino, I’d guess the circuit is probs not so different in ambition, the internals look slapped together with modest components. Again fastidious attention to component selection in mega bucks clothing and a good deal more expensive than anything TEAD produces. Pays your money, takes your choice.
TE is a character, looks like the world may swallow up another
being a “character” shouldn’t be used as a blanket term for ecscusing someone for being a cunt!
FWIW, this is 98% audiophile meme. Sure, with sensitive circuits, it is wise to minimise large masses of ferrous metal within inductive range of relevant PCBs, but that’s not difficult to do without making everything using cheap, frail crap. That’s bodger-tier. Plastic casework is the stuff of cretins - any trivial eddy-field benefit is cancelled by depriving the circuits within of screening from external sources of RFI and EMI…
The M3 nylon standoffs that have vexed so many - anyone who wasn’t lazy and sloppy can browse a parts catalogue and find (e.g.) M4 brass standoffs of the correct height - even M4 nylon would be stronger and better… As with this, so with so much else in these devices - it’s shamefully piss-poor and unprofessional.
I don’t struggle to believe that he enjoys recreational herbal-remedies - there is a behavioural pattern that repeats itself that I have encountered numerous times…
well he must have been high AF when he thought this would all play out well!
Thank you for that.
I’m not really a YouTube person but I watched all three with great interest. Mark seems like a really nice chap, and the American guy is hoot.
Mark seems to be unsure who might possibly have made the copyright strike!
What was the record he played? At first, I assumed it’d be that.
Usually you can get away with 3-4 seconds without a content match, I think YouTube will tell you if that’s the issue though.
If by character you mean gutless shyster.
He’s not some chippy underdog to be applauded for being edgy or gifted in some way, he’s just yet another self centred selfish chancer.
That seems to answer that question!